LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 






GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 



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BY 



JOHN WHITE CHADWICK 




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NEW YORK 



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HA ER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 



1893 



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Harper's ' ' Black and White " Series. 

Illustrated. 32010, Cloth, 50 cents each 



Geoege William Ccetis. By 
John White Chadwick. 

Slayeey a>d the Slave Trade 
IN Ateica By Henry M 



Stanley 



By Francois 



The Ritaxs 

Coppee. 
The Japanese Beide. By 

Naomi Tamura 

WHrtTiEK . Notes of his Life 
AND OF HIS Feibndships. By 

Annie Fields. 



Giles Corey, Yeoman. 

Mary E. Wilkins. 
Coffee and Repabtee. 

John Kendriok Bangs. 



By 

Bv 



James Russell Lcvtell. An 

Address. By George William 
Curtis. 

Seen feom the Saddle. 
Isa Carrington Cabell. 

A Family Caxoe Trip. By 

Florence Watters Snedeker. 
A Little Swiss Sojoxten. 

William Dean Howells. 
A Lettee of Intboduction. 

A i'arce. By William Dean 
- Howells. 
In the Vestlbuxe Limited. 

By Brander Matthews. 
The Albany Depot. A Farce. 

By William Dean Howells. 



By 



By 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

For sale by all booksellers, or will be sent by the pitblisherst 
postage prepaid, on receipt of price. 



Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers. 

All rights reserved. 



PREFACE 

Augustus Graham, the founder of 
the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and 
Sciences, provided for an annual ad- 
dress on the evening of February 2 2d, 
on the character of Washington or 
" some other benefactor of America.'^ 
On February 22d, 1892, Mr. Curtis 
gave his address on Lowell, which has 
been printed in this series and which 
was his last great oration, except as 
he repeated it a few days later in New 
York. In Mr. Lowell's case, the ex- 
act coincidence of his birthday with 
that of Washington seemed to make 



inevitable the choice of that day^for 
his own eulogy. And then, too, Lowell 
was to have given the address of the 
day, if he had lived and his health 
had permitted. But without these coin- 
cidences he would have been the only 
proper subject, as the most command- 
ing figure of our recent dead ; and 
the Institute had no choice this year 
any more than last, so evidently was 
Mr. Curtis, as our noblest citizen, the 
man who best deserved the tribute of 
its respectful admiration. 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 



^^ip^HE habit of this anniversary, 



as honored by the Brooklyn 
Institute of Arts and Sci- 
ences, calls for an address upon the 
life and character of some distin- 
guished person not unworthy to be 
named with Washington as a public 
benefactor. It is not understood that 
the subject of our contemplation shall 
be of equal rank with that great captain 
both in war and peace, to whom the 
loftiest title in a people's gift has been 
accorded with devout acclaim. Were 
this demanded, the selection would 
be narrowed down to one who, not 
without many great allies, restored the 



Union into which Washington had in- 
tegrated thirteen rebellious and dis- 
cordant states, and who eradicated the 
poisonous growth which Washington 
had tolerated with a fearful heart. 
But, if only Abraham Lincoln stands 
with Washington as a public benefac- 
tor in the highest rank, there are 
many who are worthy to be named 
with these because of their command- 
ing \'irtues and their splendid ser\'ice 
to our country and mankind ; and 
amons: these, if there are some of 
more exalted genius than George Will- 
iam Curtis, and more conspicuous and 
imposing fame, there is not one who 
ser^-ed his countr}- with a more per- 
fect lovaltv. or v;ho made himself more 
widely honored and more deeply loved. 
He was born in Providence, Rhode 
Island, Februarj' 24th, 1824 ; but, as we 
gather here to-night, the nearness of 



his birthday is much less suggestive 
than this 2 2d of February, which is 
the first anniversary of his last great 
public utterance. Then he spoke of 
Lowell, and as we saw the speaker, so 
graceful, so benignant, and listened to 
his large discourse, so simple and sin- 
cere in its appreciation of his noble 
friend, set to that 

** music like mild lutes 
Or silver-coated flutes," 

which was the beauteous habit of his 
public and his private speech, yet 
noted that, however he might rise at 
times to the occasion of his theme, he 
had not that physical strength which 
in old days throbbed in his eager heart, 
we wondered whether we were enjoying 
for the last time that sound and vision 
of delight, but little thought that he 
would go from us so soon. The months 
that have elapsed since his departure 



have abounded in such eulogy as never 
in our history until now has echoed and 
re-echoed the high praise of one who 
held no political office, and on whom 
none save the briefest and most incon- 
spicuous had ever been bestowed. 
The reason for this wide and lofty trib- 
ute is not far to seek. It has been 
inspired by gratitude to one who with 
his superb orations stirred in men's 
hearts a wonderful delight and admi- 
ration ; whose Easy Chair had been 
domesticated in many thousand fire- 
side nooks, and had made him who 
sat in it a friend in every one ; whose 
public service was remembered by all 
those whose memories went back to 
those great days upon the edge of bat- 
tle, when the lines were being sharply 
drawn, and all those who were asso- 
ciated with him in the more valuable 
service of his later life. Last, but not 



least, he endeared himself immeasur- 
ably to those who knew him best, 
among v/hom were many of that guild 
which has the public eye and ear con- 
tinually beneath its magic spell. And 
it may be that with these inspirations 
there has mingled something of noble 
shame and vain regret, impelling those 
who sometimes did the living man in- 
justice in their thought and speech to 
come and fling " some mountain hare- 
bell hung with tears " upon his grave. 

Curtis's stock and parentage decreed 
that he should be well born and hap- 
pily endowed, and the great personal 
traditions of his town and state aug- 
mented his inheritance to a degree 
that made him rich indeed. His father 
was a man of fine integrity, who, for 
all the warmth of his affections, held 
his children to a strict account both 
for their morals and their manners. 



Though engaged m busmess, he was a 
lover of good books and profoundly 
interested in political affairs. The boy 
was early motherless — too early for the 
mother's memory to be a benediction 
on his life. Her father, James Burrill, 
Jr., a man remarkable for the dignity 
of his character and the eloquence 
of his speech, was a Senator of the 
United States from Rhode Island, who 
opposed in 1820 that Missouri Com- 
promise which was then a concession 
to slavery, and afterwards a barrier 
across its fateful way. When that bar- 
rier was removed in 1854, young Curtis 
was the Prince Rupert of the cavaliers 
who flung themselves upon the van- 
guard of the proslavery advance; and 
it is permitted us to wonder whether 
it was the inheritance from his noble 
ancestor which gave his youthful blood 
that moral flow. It might have come 



another way — from Dr. Samuel Hop- 
kins's antislavery spirit, one of the 
traditions of Rhode Island of which he 
loved to speak, and which quickened 
Channing's conscience to the wick- 
edness of human slavery. It might 
have come from Channing himself, his 
great spiritual leader, and did come 
from him in good measure, from what- 
ever source beside. In the fine old 
Unitarian church in Providence they 
show the pew in which Curtis sat, a 
lovely, fair-haired boy, and even then 
he had an ear that vibrated in unison 
with all beautiful and stirring speech. 
Very dear to him were the streets of 
Providence, and through them he wan- 
dered to the wharves, where not long 
before West India rum and slaves 
were landed as equally the rightful 
property of Christian gentlemen, and, 
laying his hand upon some great ship's 



blistering side, took in the genial heat 
and put himself in mystical communi- 
cation with all tropic seas and shores, 
and contracting a rare scent of East- 
ern gums and spices, to say nothing of 
West India sugar and molasses, went 
home to the domestic inquisition in 
good odor with himself and all the 
world. Later he came to love the city 
best because Roger Williams founded 
it and gave to him a phrase to con- 
jure with — " soul liberty,'' the best 
name he knew for the best thing under 
the heaven's cope. His early home 
was in the shadow of Brown Univer- 
sity, of which he had many pleasant 
memories despite the awfulness of 
Dr. Wayland's thunderous brows upon 
commencement days, and with which, 
through his brother Burrill's course of 
study there, he had the liveliest sym- 
pathy, dreaming a dream of going there 



himself some day. But this was not 
to be ; changes in the father's business 
which brought him to New York pre- 
vented it and led to happier things. 
George Eliot sang that 

* ' Were another childhood world her share, 
She would be born a little sister there " ; 

and that Curtis would have been born 
a little brother we have every reason 
to believe, so loyal was his affection to 
his older brother and so gladly did he 
follow where that brother led. Two 
years in a New York business house did 
not enamour him of a business life ; but 
if they only furnished him with the orig- 
inal of Titbottom, the old book-keeper 
of " Prue and I," and with Mr. Bourne, 
the poor rich man in that book of 
dreams, they could not have been bet- 
ter spent. Then the big brother, on 
whom the Transcendentalists had cast 



lO 



their spell, beckoned him to Brook 
Farm, and he made haste to leave his 
invoices and sales and join himself to 
those who hoped they had discovered 
there the Earthly Paradise. 

No social experiment in America has 
attracted so much attention in propor- 
tion to the numbers it engaged and the 
period of its duration as Brook Farm. 
A pair of Hawthorne's lovers once pro- 
posed a private meeting, and, coming 
to the trysting-place, found a picnic in 
possession of the field. Emerson says 
that Brook Farm was ** a perpetual pic- 
nic, a French revolution in small, an 
,Age of Reason in a patt}^-pan." But 
even a picnic asks for a seclusion of 
its own, and to Brook Farm there came 
four thousand curious visitors in a sin- 
gle year. Its history continues to at- 
tract the curious, and its historians have 
sometimes touched it with unerring 



II 



grace and charm : Curtis from time to 
time, Emerson in his delightful " His- 
toric Notes of Life and Letters in New 
England," Frothingham in his " Life 
of George Ripley," who inspired the 
enterprise and brought to it a hope 
and courage that could not easily be 
disappointed or dismayed. Better than 
these, he brought a wife of such intel- 
lectual and spiritual attainments that, 
in knowing her, young Curtis got the 
liberal education which he had seemed 
to miss. He came for study, a board- 
er, not a worker, save as his helpful 
and chivalric disposition prompted him 
to take a fork in the hay-field or to as- » 
sist the young women in their heavier 
tasks. It was rare instruction that he 
got from such teachers as Mr. and Mrs. 
Ripley, George P. Bradford in belle- 
lettres, Charles A. Dana in German, 
John S. Dwight in music. Then, too, 



12 



there were distinguished visitors — Em- 
erson ; Alcott ; Theodore Parker, com- 
ing across the fields from his West Rox- 
bury parsonage ; William Henry Chan- 
ning, full of a fine enthusiasm and a 
moving eloquence ; and Margaret Ful- 
ler, brilliant, entertaining, fascinating 
in her wise and beautiful discourse. 
These threw of what they had into the 
treasury of the common good. The 
community was at first idyllic in its 
spontaneous simplicity, and afterwards 
mechanical under the Fourier dispen- 
sation, which our young student did 
not like nor long endure. With a pro- 
foundly serious aspiration at its heart, 
there were some follies and vagaries, 
and of humorous circumstance there 
was no lack. Shunning ^'the squalid 
contentment of society," it looked some- 
times as if this had been exchanged for 
the *^ brassy and lacquered life '' of the 



hotel. Hawthorne — who came to court 
the muses, and had none of Ripley's 
meditative satisfaction in milking a 
dissentient cow — afterwards made the 
Farm the subject, after a fashion, of his 
" Blithedale Romance," describing per- 
fectly the externals of the scene, but 
leaving out the spiritual contents. He 
protested that he did not intend his 
novel for a portrait; but Curtis, writ- 
ing that, nevertheless, it represented 
what Brook Farm was to Hawthorne, 
resented the picture as no less false to 
the enterprise in general than to Mar- 
garet Fuller in particular. " No friend," 
said Emerson, "who knew Margaret 
Fuller could recognize her rich and 
brilliant genius under the dismal mask 
which the public fancied was meant for 
her in that disagreeable story." One 
thing could hardly be more different 
from another than was Mr. Curtis's hap- 



14 

py and grateful recollection of his two 
years at Brook Farm from Hawthorne's 
lugubrious romance. He never forgot 
the debt he owed to it, and to his broth- 
er for directing thitherward his steps. 
The flowers and fruits he gathered there 
furnished the seeds of many a future 
good. Very pleasant are the recollec- 
tions of his happy youth, as he enjoyed 
it there, which have been cherished by 
his friends. In those recollections he 
passes and repasses, graceful as a fawn, 
his face as gravely beautiful as in his 
maturer years, impersonating Hamlet 
in the masquerade or singing the whole 
evening long to the Arcadian band ; his 
best distinction being that he was the 
little children's friend, blessing them 
where others cursed, and always ready 
to help them in a tangled lesson or lead 
them in a merry game. 

The highest influence which touched 



15 

him at Brook Farm was that of Emer- 
son. The same influence was continued 
at Concord for two years, and deepened 
by a closer contact and more frequent 
intercourse with the gentle seer. It 
was an influence more practical than 
speculative. The doctrine of the Over- 
soul might be so high that he could not 
attain to it; but the summons to sim- 
plicity, to sincerity, to independence, to 
a preference for the light within his 
own clear breast to any other, however 
vaunted as from heaven, was perfectly 
comprehensible — easily understood, if 
not as easily obeyed. At Concord the 
brothers were hired laborers with one 
farmer and another ; but shortening the 
working hours, except in hay-time, that 
they might explore " the unknown riv- 
er " or the country roads or give them- 
selves to serious studies. The Con- 
cord residence also brought our hero 



i6 

into personal relations with Haw- 
thorne, Thoreau, Alcott, and Ellery 
Channing, but with imperfect sympa- 
thy, not even Emerson's good opinion 
of Alcott's wisdom being able to prevent 
Curtis's listening to it with an incred- 
ulous smile and speaking of it with an 
irreverent laugh. Already the extreme- 
ly practical, unspeculative quality of his 
mind was making itself evident. The 
profound originality of Emerson never 
lost its hold upon his mind, but for 
what was merely peculiar and eccentric 
in the Transcendental Movement he 
soon acquired a frank distaste. Pos- 
sibly he had heard from Emerson the 
wise saying of Goethe, " A talent is per- 
fected in solitude ; a character, in the 
stream of the world." It was on the 
formation of a character that at this 
time he was bent, and -for this the 
isolation of a peculiar people seemed 



17 

hardly more favorable than solitude. 
And so again he followed the big 
brother's lead — this time to Europe 
for four years of residence, mixing 
with huge enjoyment of the spectacle 
a good deal of studious w^ork, adding 
one European language to another, and 
attending lectures in the German uni- 
versities. But all Europe was, in fact, 
his university, with a post-graduate 
course in Egypt and the Holy Land. 

He went abroad in 1846, when he 
was twenty-two years old, and returned 
in 1850. Doubtless in some respects 
a more definite curriculum would have 
furnished him with a better education. 
But it was not as if he had put a girdle 
round the earth in forty minutes. His 
whole course of travel was unhurried, 
and in Venice and Berlin he lingered a 
whole season through. With Cranch 
and Hicks and Kensett he revelled in 
3 



the wonders of Italian art and in the 
skies that overhung so smilingly the 
sad and strange memorials of a great- 
ness that had passed away. That his 
stay in Europe coincided with the rev- 
olution of 1848 was a circumstance of 
immense significance, giving a sharper 
spice of personal danger to journeys 
which at the best were none too safe ; 
the fierce outbreaks in every city fur- 
nishing moments of exuberant hope 
and tragedies of inevitable defeat. 
Here was a world so much larger than 
any that our saunterer had known be- 
fore, that it could not but expand his 
sympathies and give his thoughts a 
wider and a deeper flow. At the same 
time it stored his mind with an incal- 
culable wealth and splendor of histor- 
ical associations and with memories 
of delightful scenes and happy-hearted 
friends, which later were to him an in- 



19 

exhaustible resource when he would 
give his public utterance some rarer 
charm or clothe it with some ampler 
grace. 

It must not be imagined that up to 
this time Curtis had been merely a 
passive bucket, coolly accepting every- 
thing that was pumped into him and 
rendering nothing back. To be a man 
of letters was his dream before he left ^ 
Brook Farm. There and at Concord he 
wrote many things, but, with an exigent 
ideal they did not satisfy, he kept them 
to himself or only read them privately. 
To read them now would do much, no 
doubt, to dispel the sweet illusion that 
his style was heaven-born, needing no 
patient travail of his mind to bring it 
forth. They would reveal "the steps 
of beauty " by which he climbed from 
his first crudities and imperfections to 
so much of ease and grace as marked 



20 



his early publications ; also the pri- 
mordial germs of some of the most 
lovely fancies of his later years. Cer- 
tain letters to the Harbinger in 1845 
were his first venture of a public char- 
acter, and the publicity was not gross, 
but narrow and select, seeing that the 
Harbinger was the organ of the Brook- 
Farmers in their Fourierite decadence. 
The letters were written from New York 
in the interim between his leaving Con- 
cord and his going abroad. They were 
musical and dramatic criticisms. From 
Europe he sent occasional letters to the 
New York Times and Tribune^ and on 
his return he immediately engaged in 
musical and dramatic criticism for Mr. 
Greeley, who by this time had made 
Ripley of Brook Farm the literary edi- 
tor, and Charles A. Dana, Curtis's best 
friend in the same Arcadia, the manag- 
ing editor of his paper. Shortly his tal- 



21 



ent took a wider sweep, and the read- 
ers of the Tribune^ in 185 1, found Mr. 
Greeley's heartless recommendations of 
the recent compromise measures as the 
best we could expect agreeably diversi- 
fied with those studies of Newport and 
Nahant and Saratoga and the other wa- 
tering-places of that time which make 
up the book called " Lotus-Eating." It 
is a charming book ; so charming that 
to stay at home and read it would per- 
haps give more pleasure than those fa- 
mous places now afford. Doctor Chan- 
ning thought it not presumptuous to 
hope that something corresponding to 
our earthly joys of air and light would 
be permitted us in another life, and in 
this particular Curtis must have sympa- 
thized with him. He had the art of 
husbanding these joys and of so mak- 
ing his words express them that those 
days of long ago still shed their beauty 



22 



on our hearts. In these studies there 
was a good deal of comparative scenery, 
the writer was so drenched in mists 
of Alpine heights and falling waters, 
and in the associations of an older civ- 
ilization. The *' emotion recollected in 
tranquillity " was often keener than any 
which the immediate object could ex- 
cite. But more important than the de- 
scription of each lovely scene was the 
eye for social manners and the stroke 
that gave their hollowness and insin- 
cerit}', their meanness and vulgarit}', 
a shameful perpetuit}' upon the vivid 
page. 

Almost simultaneously with ** Lotus- 
Eating" appeared the "Nile Notes of 
a Howadji," and soon after *' The How- 
adji in S}Tia.''" Whereupon the young 
author woke up one fine morning to 
find himself famous and dubbed " The 
Howadji *' by his friends, from whom 



23 

the sobriquet was caught up by the 
general public and did much to invest 
him with a mysterious charm, as vague 
and penetrating as some perfume of the 
Eastern world. In point of art these 
books were an advance upon the '' Lo- 
tus-Eating/' but morally they marked a 
previous stage. They were no stern re- 
flections on the soft, languorous mood 
the Orient had woven round and round 
him with its subtle spells. They were 
the reproduction of that mood, floated 
off from the pages of his journal, where 
it lay as warm as Eastern draperies 
and as bright as Khadra's smile. As 
for this real or imaginary Khadra with 
w^hom the Howadji instituted a flirta- 
tion in the Church of the Holy Sepul- 
chre, this episode was doubtless one 
of several which shocked the Puritan 
temper of the time. In truth it marked 
the exquisite satirical recoil from the 



24 

pretence of holiness in things and places 
that could claim no genuine associa- 
tions with the Christian origins. The 
one engrossing memory of Palestine 
sternly required reality of every cir- 
cumstance and emotion. But while 
the " Nile Notes " and '' The Howadji 
in Syria '' were not immoral in a single 
phrase or implication — and Curtis very 
properly and indignantly resented any 
suggestion to the contrary — he had no 
regrets or apologies to offer for his 
complete abandonment of himself to 
the peculiar witchery of the East, and 
to Egypt's fascination as of Cleopatra's 
smile. " Delight and satisfaction which 
are not sensual but sensuous," he wrote, 
*' become the law of your being; con- 
science, lulled all the way from Sicily 
in the soft rocking lap of the Mediter- 
ranean, falls quite asleep at Cairo, and 
you take your chance with the other 



25 

flowers." What prophetess that had 
presumed to prophesy that the author 
of a brace of books written in this tem- 
per would yet be found among the or- 
ganizers of public justice and the lead- 
ers of political reform, would not have 
met Cassandra's fate ?— the most abso- 
lute incredulity on the part of every 
one who heard her prophecy. Nothing 
seemed more unlikely in 1852 than that 
in 1856 Curtis would be stirring up the 
young men of America to noble rage 
against a giant wrong. Do men gather 
w^heat and corn of violets and roses ? 
Nevertheless, reading the " Nile Notes " 
and "The Howadji in Syria" in the 
light of Curtis's subsequent career, we 
find among the roses and the violets, 
among the sleepy lotuses and the smil- 
ing houris, a few happy signs that he 
had not wholly lost the secret of his 
earlier inspirations ; that the fire he 
4 



26 

had kindled at Brook Farm and Con- 
cord had not gone out upon the altar 
of his mind, and might yet touch his 
lips with living flame. 

The time was one of moral relax- 
ation. Horace Greeley and William 
Cullen Bryant had accepted as a final- 
ity the Compromise Measures which 
had brought Whittier's "Ichabod" upon 
Webster's head: if such, how many 
more ! The antislavery vote fell off 
nearly one half from 1843 to 1852. 
But we need not look so far away 
for influences inimical to Curtis's dis- 
covery of his better self. His manly 
beauty and his social graces opened 
for him all doors. He adopted De 
Quincey's rapturous praise of dancing 
as his own, and never at any time was 
he disloyal to this early love. Until 
the last he would sooner have spoken 
disrespectfully of our old friend the 



27 

equator than of Terpsichore — '* Muse 
of the many twinkling feet.'^ Culti- 
vated, brilliant, witty, wearing with easy 
grace the laurels of his first success, he 
found himself the cynosure of women^s 
lovely eyes, the object of a thousand 
flatteries, with much honest admiration. 
Then the reaction came. There are 
fore-gleams of it in " Lotus- Eating," and 
in " The Potiphar Papers '' it blazes 
from the hot, indignant page. " It is 
called a satire, but after much dili- 
gent reading we cannot discover the 
satire.'' These words are Curtis's, and 
he is speaking of Thackeray's " Vanity 
Fair." They are equally applicable to 
" The Potiphar Papers," especially to 
the opening chapter, which is perfectly 
direct and simple, without a syllable of 
paltering in a double sense. It was 
the condemnation of a society which 
was " the very apotheosis of gilt ginger- 



28 

bread." Had Curtis seen the horrid 
spectacle that he described ? Yes; but 
with Titmarsh's, not with Titbottom's, 
spectacles. It is not strange that Cur- 
tis didn't love the book in after-years. 
He knew that it was after Thackeray, 
and, like the artist's " Bull after Paul 
Potter," a long way after. He had 
struck with the butt of his musket and 
the back of his sword, not with the 
bayonet and the edge. Thackeray's 
rapier had turned into a bludgeon in 
his unpractised hand. He did better 
the next time, in ^* Prue and I," a fan- 
tasy that was all his own, full of the 
sweetness and the kindliness of his 
own gentle heart. It is just as good 
to-day as when it first appeared. It 
will be just as good fifty years hence 
as it is now, for if by that time the 
world is done with vulgar ostentation, 
done with the pride of wealth, done 



29 

with the measuring of all things by a 
gold standard, it will not be done with 
simplicity and sincerity, with beauty, 
tenderness, and grace, with sentiment 
as pure as morning's dew ; and " Prue 
and I '^ is a book so full of these things 
that until the world is done with them 
forever it should have a place for it 'i 

''Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet 
breathing." 

" The Potiphar Papers " and '' Prue 
and I " were written for Putnam^ s New 
Mo7ithly Magazine^ of which Curtis was 
for several years an editor, with Charles 
F. Briggs of our own city — better known 
as " Harry Franco " — and Parke God- 
win as his colaborers. Curtis's letters 
to Briggs from all parts of the coun- 
try are full of gayety. He address- 
es him by all the famous names of his- 
tory, and signs himself with others 



30 

equally various and absurd. Was he 
still able to maintain this cheerful tone 
when in 1857 the publication-house in 
which he had put all his patrimony, 
and much more, went down a hopeless 
wreck, and left him with a debt upon 
his shoulders so ponderous that not 
till 1873 was it paid to the last cent 
and his freedom jo}iully regained? 
Less conscientious, he might have 
availed himself of a purely technical 
construction to evade the monstrous 
claim with which he had been saddled 
by a dishonest partner. But to any 
friend suggesting to him such a course 
the answer would have been, " Get thee 
behind me, Satan " ; if not the words, 
*^ a fury in the words '' connoting that. 
Considering himself morally bound, he 
manfully assumed the debt, and, v;ork- 
ing like a slave with tongue and pen, 
and living with severe economy, he 



31 

devoted all his savings from his thirty- 
fourth until his fiftieth year — the period 
of his perfect prime — to the payment 
of a penalty too hastily and foolishly 
incurred. Here was an experience to 
toughen the moral fibre of the man, if 
there was any need of further tough- 
ening after the initial step. The event 
proved that there was need of this ; 
that the stuff which served him well 
enough in the antislavery struggle 
would have been broken like a reed 
under the stress of such political 
weather as he encountered further on. 
It may seem that, in accepting for him- 
self this steep ascent, he had proved 
himself to be possessed already of the 
most stubborn and unconquerable will. 
But he that putteth on the harness 
may not boast himself as he that taketh 
it off. Many hard things have been 
resolved upon by men of a romantic 



32 

temper in the self - consciousness of 
some dramatic situation, where few 
have been carried out to an appro- 
priate end. It is the end that crowns 
the work. There came a time when 
those who did not know the man, per- 
sons of credulous disposition or inven- 
tive mind, were ready to impute to him 
some mercenary or prudential motive 
for his political action. Then those 
who knew him best, remembering the 
patient service of those hard intermina- 
ble years, smiled sadly to themselves 
to think that one who seemed to be 
so widely known should be so little un- 
derstood. 

The public was still calling Curtis 
the Howadji when he began to call 
himself the Easy Chair, having suc- 
ceeded to that comfortable - sounding 
place in Harper's Magazine^ which for 
two years before his own incumbency 



33 

had been filled by Donald G. Mitchell, 
whose " Dream Life " and " Reveries 
of a Bachelor" are to-day as much as 
ever necessary to every youth and 
maid for whom no sentiment can be 
too pure and sweet. Considering the 
various work and worry, corresponding 
with the five and thirty years of his 
incumbency, which Curtis had to do 
and bear, his new sobriquet had a 
tinge of irony. The long course of 
little essays which as the Easy Chair 
he wrote for our instruction, warning, 
and delight is a sufficient answer to 
the vain regret that he should have 
abandoned the primrose path of liter- 
ature for the shards and thorns of the 
political highways and byways. It is 
not the only answer, for he w^as an 
editor and an orator as well as an es- 
sayist for thirty years, and both as 
orator and editor he was as much the 
5 



34 

man of letters as in the more unbent 
and playful manifestation of his talents 
in the Easy Chair. Those who, for- 
getting this, imagine that Curtis ceased 
from being literary when he became 
political have only to compare his edi- 
torials in Harper's Weekly with so much 
of the editorial writing of his contem- 
poraries as makes up its general bulk, 
or the text of his various addresses and 
orations with the chaotic formlessness 
or the swelling bombast of the contem- 
porary clergyman or politician. But 
the Easy Chair alone is a sufficient 
answer to the regrets of those who, 
doubtless, would have been much hap- 
pier if Curtis had confined himself 
to that and let their politics alone. 
The various lines that marked his ear- 
lier work are all continued here : the 
musical and dramatic criticism of the 
Tribune reporter; the social satire of 



35 

the " Potiphar Papers," but with a 
more genial touch ; the reveries of 
" Prue and I '' ; while the same travels 
that had furnished the materials for 
the " Nile Notes " and " The Howadji 
in Syria'' lent their rich lights and 
tender gleams to many a happy remi- 
niscence of the unreturning days. But 
the essays of the Easy Chair ranged 
through a wider field than the first lit- 
erary ventures. Sometimes, as in " Ho- 
nestus at the Caucus," they trenched 
upon the subjects habitually treated 
on the political platform and in the 
editorial chair, but in a manner of their 
own. Often, when some large-natured, 
earnest, useful man or woman passed 
within the veil, we were invited to re- 
flect upon their virtues, and to take 
to heart the lessons of their beautiful 
and noble lives. The good books as 
well as the good people received their 



36 

careful and discriminating meed of 
praise. 

"He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
Brought the age of gold again " : 

the oratory of Everett and Phillips ; the 
readings of Charles Dickens ; the lect- 
ures of Thackeray and his personal 
traits, the dinners that he gave, the 
songs he sung ; the playing of Thal- 
berg and Gottschaik; the acting of 
Rachel : the sin2:ino; of manv a delis^ht- 
ful voice, but of Jenny Lind's above 
them all, blessed forever ; for when at 
Castle Garden, on the eve of her de- 
parture from America, she sang her 
farewell song, she held in her hand a 
bouquet of white rosebuds and deep 
carnations ; and the young man, who 
five years before had travelled from 
Dresden to Berlin expressly to hear her 
sing, alone in that great audience knew 



37 

who had sent those flowers. Here 
alone was pledge of a perpetual hom- 
age, had not the divine simplicity of 
her art demanded it. Many were the 
good causes, weak, struggling, baffled, 
well-nigh crushed to earth, that looked 
to the Easy Chair for some encourage- 
ment, and did not look in vain ! Mean- 
time the style, the form, the manner of 
the thing, which in the earlier ventures 
had not always been simple and re- * 
strained, had found out the more ex- 
cellent way and kept it with an even 
step. Emerson's conviction of the pow- 
er of under-statement had been taken 
well to heart. With less of ornament, 
there was more of the essential beauty 
which could dispense with it and shine 
henceforth with a more pleasing light. 
Seeing that from first to last there were 
some fifteen hundred of these little es- 
says, the marvellous thing is that, with so 



38 

many variations of the central theme, 
there was so much variety. And what 
; was the central theme ? It was a plea 
for good society ; for the best society ; 
which is not a matter of wealth, nor of 
some nobody's descent from somebody 
who was somebody or had something 
in some former generation ; but a mat- 
ter of intelligence and simplicity and 
kindliness, freedom from vulgar show, 
the love of things that make for honor, 
purity, and nobility in the most ordi- 
nary lives. Here was a mirror held up 
to our social nature in America, where, 
if many thousands did not see them- 
selves with shame, if not with loathing, 
they must have shut their eyes. Here, 
too, was that plea for the most Ameri- 
can as the most self-respecting, the 
most honest, the most excellent, which 
was the burden equally of many an 
after-dinner speech and many a lecture 



-TT 



39 

and address. One thing has not yet 
been determined by any critic of the 
Easy Chair — whether we should be 
more grateful to it for its exposure of 
our social shams and insincerities and 
its appeal to the better instincts of our 
social natures, or for its contribution to 
the beauty and the pleasantness of hu- 
man life, the need of these things also 
being very great. 

But Curtis is much less the writer 
than the speaker in the fond memory 
of his countrymen who had personal 
knowledge of his lectures and orations 
and in the imagination of less fortunate 
people. The lyceum forty years ago 
offered a splendid opportunity to the 
men who could speak as well as write, 
and it was seized upon by a great com- 
pany of powerful, brilliant men, with 
some of an inferior degree. Curtis 
stepped in at once among the giants of 



40 

those days on his return from his long 
stay in foreign lands, and it was not 
long before his place among them was 
clearly defined and perfectly assured. 
It was not as the most massive or 
the most vehement or incisive or pro- 
found or humorous and impassioned. 
These desimations belono;ed to Par- 
ker, Chapin, Phillips, Emerson, and 
Beecher. Curtis was the most pleas- 
ing, the most gracious, the most serene 
and musical of the goodly fellovrship. 
As time went on he became one of the 
most serious and impressive. Nature 
had gifted him with a voice of rare and 
penetrating sweetness, which, somehow, 
he had learned or caught the art of 
using as an instrument obedient to 
ever}' touch of his emotion and to ev- 
er}- variation of his intellectual mood. 
From his first topic, '' Contemporary 
Art in Europe/' he soon passed to 



41 

" Gold and Gilt in America/' evidently 
the doctrine of " The Potiphar Papers" 
driven home by vi^ord of mouth. It 
was not long before the ^'' Sir Philip 
Sidney '' lecture led the way in a long 
file of splendid characterizations of 
gentle and heroic men, deserving well 
the strain of lofty praise. Sumner, 
Phillips, Irving, Bryant, Lowell — these 
and their "star -bright companions" 
have a sure hold on the immortal years 
in their own words and works ; but they 
will have a larger place in many a pri- 
vate heart because of Curtis's sincere, 
though fervid, tributes to their various 
worth. Besides, how many great occa- 
sions did he set each in its round of 
golden circumstance, and find in each 
some noble shame and happy inspira- 
tion for the immediate time ! He never 
forfeited the lofty privilege of public 
speech by using it merely to flatter 
6 



42 

men, or make them laugh or cry, when 
he could turn it to some good account 
for truth and righteousness. The city 
banquet or the country festival that 
would have him for its ornament must 
have him on these terms or not at all. 
On the lyceum platform he spoke from 
his own personal conviction straight to 
the consciences of his fellow-men. As 
one turns over now the faded manu- 
scripts, he may well wonder whether 
the forty -two lyceum associations to 
which he gave a lecture on " Modern 
Infidelity" in 1859 got what they bar- 
gained for. It could not have been of 
this lecture that a lady said to him, 
meaning to be very complimentary, 
" Oh, Mr. Curtis, how flowery that 
was !" For this one was just plain 
preaching, without one purple patch ; 
driving home with various argument 
and illustration the protestant princi- 



/ 



43 

pie of the right of private judgment 
and the sacredness of individual opin- 
ion — in defiance, if need be, of all tradi- 
tion and authority and public opinion 
whatsoever. No, he had not forgotten 
the lessons Emerson had taught him 
in the days ere yet " the superb and 
irresistible dandyism that we all know 
so well in the days of golden youth" 
had threatened for a time to take him 
in its snare. 

But it was not the lecture upon 
" Modern Infidelity,'' nor that upon 
'' Fair Play for Women," that made 
Curtis's name in 1859 ^ name to be 
spoken against and one to stir up in 
the City of Brotherly Love a fierce 
and cruel mob, swearing he should not 
deliver his lecture, that they would 
hang him if he tried to do it, and to 
that end providing a stout rope. That 
was the finest compliment that Curtis 



44 

ever received, and it was well deserved, 
for the subject of his lecture was "The 
Present Aspect of the Slavery Ques- 
tion," and the date was December 
15th, thirteen days after the hanging 
of John Brown. The proslavery spirit 
raged as fiercely in New York and 
Philadelphia as in Charleston or Sa- 
vannah, and the fear and terror were as 
great of John Brown's marching soul. 
Tvlr. Curtis had lectures in his portfolio 
that w^ould not have jarred upon the 
sensibilities of a proslavery audience. 
That upon *' Contemporary Art in Eu- 
rope" would have been perfectly ac- 
ceptable. But Dr. Furness, wdth whom 
Mr. Curtis w^as staying in Philadelphia 
— the mildest-mannered man that ever 
faced a mob — was of the opinion that 
the lecture on " The Present Aspect of 
the Slaver}^ Question " must be given, 
and Mr. Curtis was not in the least in- 



45 

clined to hold it back. And it was given ; 
the lecturer going to the hall aware of 
six revolvers in the pockets of his per- 
sonal friends. It was given while six 
hundred policemen held the mob at 
bay, though unable to prevent its shat- 
tering the windows and injuring the 
audience with bricks and stones. It 
was a very calm and rational consid- 
eration of the only question which just 
then was worth considering. Evident- 
ly the Howadji's conscience, which had 
gone to sleep at Cairo, was now wide 
awake. 

But its awakening had been late and 
slow. Five years younger than Lowell, 
Curtis was ten years behind him in the 
arousal of his antislavery spirit. Ap- 
parently there was something in the 
soil of Brook Farm that did not make 
good antislavery root and stalk. Low- 
ell's '' Present Crisis " he had regarded 



46 

not, nor the ^' Biglow Papers," nor 
Whittier's imprecatory psalms, nor Sum- 
ner's fruitless summons to Webster: 
"Assume, sir, these unperformed du- 
ties." In the " Potiphar Papers " there 
is one sentence, one only, that is pro- 
phetic of the coming man. The send- 
ing back of Thomas Sims or Anthony 
Burns to slavery excites him to another, 
written from Longfellow's house in Cam- 
bridge to a friend. Less was impossi- 
ble for one who had counted Channing 
and Parker among the teachers of his 
youth. But in 1856 he also was among 
the prophets. Whence his awakening ? 
In part, no doubt, from the same shock 
which had awakened Abraham Lincoln 
to a new manhood, and the conviction 
that a house divided against itself could 
not stand — the repeal of the Missouri 
Compromise in 1854. In part, some- 
thing quite different and much more 



47 

personal. The girl who drew him to 
herself from all the multitude with 
whom he had danced so dreamily was 
a daughter of Francis George and Sarah 
B. Shaw, and these were antislavery 
people through and through. They had 
received the gospel from Theodore Par- 
ker when they were his West Roxbury 
parishioners, and from Lydia Maria 
Child, a teacher of the teachers in this 
holy war. No more than Garrison could 
they say, " This one thing I do " ; but 
every true reform, as such, attracted 
them. Their influence upon Curtis 
must have been very great, so perfect- 
ly did they command his admiration 
and inspire his reverence and love. 
But, whatever influences worked the 
change, it was unmistakable, and it was 
potent for incalculable good. Some- 
thing romantic in the character of Fre- 
mont may have made it easier for Cur- 



48 

tis to espouse his cause. But once 
espoused, it lifted him at once into the 
height of the great argument which was 
then going on. At Middletown, Con- 
necticut, he addressed the students of 
the Wesleyan University on " The Duty 
of the American Scholar to Politics 
and the Times." He said: *' I would 
gladly speak to you of the charms of 
pure scholarship ; of the dignity and 
worth of the scholar; of the abstract 
relation of the scholar to the State. 
. . . But would you have counted him 
a friend of Greece who quietly dis- 
cussed the abstract nature of patriot- 
ism on that Greek summer day through 
whose hopeless and immortal hours 
Leonidas and his three hundred stood 
at Thermopylae for liberty?" The ap- 
plication was obvious, but it was not 
left to be inferred. It was insisted on 
with all the frankness, emphasis, and 



49 

eloquence that the young speaker could 
command. Kansas was the new Ther- 
mopylae. The duty of the American 
scholar was to fight slavery-extension 
there and wherever it should rear its 
horrid front. The same word was spo- 
ken to the young men of other colleges. 
We have all met some of those young 
men, now getting old, and their faces 
have glowed, and their eyes have flashed 
or dimmed, as they have told us how 
their hearts leaped up to meet the 
young orator's challenge of their man- 
hood with a glad reply. It was a pro- 
foundly significant circumstance that 
then, and for the next four years, Cur- 
tis was a young man speaking to young 
men. The young manhood of the coun- 
try elected him its representative in 
the great debate, idealized itself in the 
bright vision of his radiant personality 
and glowing speech, and pledged itself 
7 



50 

to go upon whatever quest this Galahad 
assigned. The careful student of those 
times assures us that it was the vote of 
the young men who came to their first 
ballot from 1856 to i860 that made 
the defeat of Fremont in the former, a 
victory for Lincoln in the latter, year. 
But they did more than this : they 
made the victory for Lincoln a victory 
for emancipation as the w^ar went on ; 
albeit the Republican party had so far 
assimilated the Compromises of 1850, 
and Daniel Webster's seventh-of-March 
speech, that neither in its platform of 
1856 nor in its platform of i860 had it 
demanded the repeal of the Fugitive- 
Slave Law or the abolition of slavery 
in the District of Columbia. It was 
the Abolitionist -Republicans that put 
the war-power of the government into 
Lincoln's hands and bade him use it 
for the emancipation of the slave. And 



51 

Curtis was an Abolitionist-Republican, 
a Republican with a truly moral, not 
merely a political, hatred of slavery, and 
his influence with the young men of 
America wa^ compact not merely with 
hatred of slavery-extension, but with 
hatred of slavery itself, and the con- 
viction that slavery in America must 
perish before Freedom could begin to 
live her proper life. It was an influence 
distinctly calculated to abate the in- 
fluence of the cohorts of place-hunters, 
whom the doubtfulness of victory had 
kept at bay in 1856, but whom the pros- 
pect of victory in i860 brought down 
like a wolf on the fold. Here, in this 
three-fold service — his marshalling of 
the young men the way that they should 
go, his abolitionizing of the Republi- 
can party, his distrust of those who 
came into the party as it swept to vic- 
tory because they understood that to 



52 

the victors in politics belonged the 
spoils of office — here was a service 
which would make the name of Curtis 
forever eminent and honorable if he 
had done no other to the party that he 
loved so much, to the country that he 
loved so much more than party, to the 
wide humanity and the eternal justice 
that he loved the most of all. 

Yet this was but a little part of his 
great work; and from 1863, when he 
became editor of Harper'' s Weekly^ his 
opportunity for influencing his coun- 
trymen was immeasurably enhanced. 
Here was a chair, less easy than the 
other, from which he could speak every 
week to some two or three hundred 
thousand of his countrymen, if not 
twice or thrice as many. So great a 
privilege was never more_ enjoyed or 
exercised with a better conscience for 
the work in hand. If his leaders do 



53 

not contain a history of our politics 
during thirty interesting and eventful 
years, they contain a commentary and 
a criticism on that history of great 
value, and in their day they were an 
effective contribution to public opin- 
ion and did much to shape it to the 
most honorable and useful ends. The 
editor's predilection was for the larger 
aspects of events, and from his calm 
discussion one would hardly guess, at 
this remove, what storms were some- 
times beating on the four corners of 
the house, and how the fountains of the 
great political deep were broken up. It 
is easy to be wise long after the event ; 
not easy to be always wise right in the 
heart of it. Could Curtis have fore- 
seen all that he saw at length, he would 
have written differently of many persons 
and of many things. But in the main it 
is remarkable how frequently his judg- 



54 

ment has been ratified by the subse- 
quent consensus of the competent. To 
the impeachment of President Johnson 
he brought a hesitating sympathy ; but, 
when the impeachment failed, there 
was no hesitation in the stern rebuke 
which he administered to those who 
were for drummins: Fessenden and 
Grimes and Trumbull out cf the party 
because they had refused to vote ac- 
cording to the partisan dictation. In 
the agonies of reconstruction he fore- 
saw the dan2:ers that would ensue on 
the enfranchisement of the emanci- 
pated slaves : but he was a politician 
after the manner of Burke, insisting 
that one must always do the best thing 
possible, though it may not be the best 
imaginable. He brought the same 
common-sense to the disputed election 
of 1S76. advocating in advance, and 
afterwards sustaining loyally, the heroic 



55 

remedy that allayed the raging fever of 
the time. He thought highly of the 
advice which Sir Philip Sidney gave 
his brother, " Whenever you hear of a 
good war, go to it," and in his editorial 
work he never failed to act upon this 
hint. At one time it was a war for 
municipal purification ; at another for 
the rights of women to whatever of in- 
dustrial, educational, and political en- 
largement they require for a more com- 
plete and noble womanhood ; at another 
against those who made the capitol at 
Washington for some years a den of 
thieves; and first, last, and always the 
war he went to was a war for inde- 
pendence in politics and for the con- 
duct of the civil government on busi- 
ness principles — "The tools to those 
who can handle them, as long as they 
handle them well." 
y^ When Curtis spoke of Lowell in this 



56 

place a year ago, his admiration for his 
friend, ascending from one summit to 
another, hailed him at last the repre- 
sentative Independent in our politics. 
Straight^vay we saw the wreath which 
he had woven for another circle his 
own head. With happy and serene 
unconsciousness, in describing Lowell's 
independency he had described his 
own ; and when we gave him our ap- 
plause, it was even more for Lowell's 
eulogist than for Lowell that we made 
it loud and long. No other Indepen- 
dent was so conspicuous or so influen- 
tial in 1884. He was the president- 
maker of that strange and fateful year, 
but his independency was not the in- 
cident of a particular campaign ; it was 
the persistent habit of his whole polit- 
ical career. It was as an Independent, 
in the convention which nominated 
Abraham Lincoln, that he alone of all 



57 

the delegation from his State refused 
to bind himself to vote for Mr. Seward 
to the bitter end. It was as an Inde- 
pendent that he smashed the party pro- 
gramme in the same convention, when 
it had driven out Joshua R. Giddings 
and refused to incorporate a phrase 
from the Declaration of Independence 
in the party platform. Then it was 
that, with one of the shortest speeches 
that he ever made, he reversed the ac- 
tion of the convention and brought 
back its ** grand old man " to enjoy 
the triumph won. It was as an Inde- 
pendent that he stood in 1868 for the 
right of Fessenden and his companions 
to vote as they thought best on the 
impeachment, whatever the most se- 
cret counsels of the party had decreed. 
It was as an Independent that he ad- 
vised men to refuse their votes to one 

candidate for the governorship of New 
8 



58 

York and to vote against another, suit- 
ing his actions to his words. And 
when in 1884 the Republican party pro- 
ceeded to make what seemed to him 
" a nomination not fit to be made/' 
there was nothing, even in the most 
particular circumstances of the event, 
that had been unprepared for in his 
experience up to that sorrowful and 
boding time. In 1873, when General 
Butler was raiding Massachusetts in 
the hope of capturing a nomination for 
the place which John Hancock and 
Samuel Adams had once filled, Curtis 
had written : " A caucus or a conven- 
tion is merely a conference of delegates 
of the party to determine how the or- 
ganization may, at the particular time 
and under the existing circumstances, 
best procure its end. . , . It is the 
duty of each delegate to spare no ef- 
fort to influence wisely the action of 



59 

the party. He cannot rightfully sur- 
render his opportunity to prevent an 
enormous and fatal party blunder. . . . 
But no delegate has lost the privilege of 
doing right because he has tried to per- 
suade others not to do wrong.'' These 
principles lost nothing of their cogency 
as time went on, and when the time 
arrived for him to act on them in 1884 
he did so without a moment's hesita- 
tion, though not without many did he 
consent to take that position of leader- 
ship in the revolt to which he was in- 
evitably assigned. But because no 
man had ever loved the Republican 
party more than he, or served it more 
unselfishly, it was as if his heart were 
cleft asunder by the blow which sev- 
ered him from its counsels and mar- 
shalled him in the opposing ranks. 
The conscientiousness of his behavior 
must be measured by his devotion to 



6o 

the Republican tradition of nationality 
as opposed to the Democratic insist- 
ence upon local rights — a devotion 
which made him an independent Re- 
publican until his dying day; by his 
passionate response to the associations 
of a glorious party history, in which his 
had been a great and honorable share ; 
and by the great refusals that he made ; 
for he was not without ambition, and, 
could he have accepted the conclusions 
which were honestly maintained by 
many of his wisest and mxost trusted 
friends, honors but little meaner than 
the highest would have been easily 
within his grasp. But he had long 
fed his heart on the great words of 
Martin Luther, "For it is neither safe 
nor right to do anything against con- 
science " ; and in the crucial hour he 
faced the sovereignty of America, as 
Luther had faced the sovereignty of 



6i 

the Empire, and said very simply, 
" Here I stand ; I can do no other- 
wise. God help me ! Amen !'' 

" Whenever you hear of a good war 
go to it/' He heard of many, and he 
went to each in turn with a strong, pa- 
tient heart, doing his best to bring the 
good things uppermost and to beat the 
others down. But his biggest war — 
which did not make his ambition virtue, 
because it found it so — was against 
the doctrine that to the political victors 
belong the spoils of office, and upon 
the practice which illustrated and en- 
forced this doctrine in every State and 
city, as well as in the general govern- 
ment, of the United States. Even his 
political independence was an incident 
of this larger business, a means direct- 
ed to the end of honest and effective ad- 
ministration, which we can never have 
so long as it is understood that the 



62 

party candidate must be supported, 
whatever his moral character, once the 
nomination has been made. Many, 
before Curtis found his place as the 
acknowledged head and front of the 
Civil Service Reform movement, had 
appreciated the dangers of the situa- 
tion, and had done yeomen^s service 
in the first steps towards reformation, 
which always cost so much when giant 
evils are assailed. Those who insist 
that the spoils system is inseparable 
from party government are strangely 
ignorant that there was no such sys- 
tem during the presidency of Washing- 
ton and his successors for a period of 
forty years, and that it first arose from 
no political necessity, but in General 
Jackson's personal animosity to John 
Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. Once 
having taken root, it grew as only 
do the deadliest morbid growths. It 



63 

should go hard but they would better 
their instructions, the Whigs said to the 
Democrats,whentheyhad drowned Clay 
and Webster in hard cider, and floated 
themselves into office on that amber tide. 
With each successive party change there 
was a cleaner sweep. There were some 
mild rebukes, some passionate execra- 
tions ; but they were iridescent bubbles, 
quickly breaking in the thick and pois- 
oned air. Moreover, the time had the 
defect of its quality. The antislavery 
enterprise was too engrossing for any 
other to find lodgement in the public 
mind. Yet the ethical laws were not so 
silent in the midst of arms that Abra- 
ham Lincoln could not hear their sol- 
emn voices when he said, pointing to 
a crowd of office-seekers that besieged 
his door, " Here you have something 
that may become more dangerous to 
the Republic than the rebellion itself." 



64 

But it was in the years immediately 
following the war that the evils of the 
spoils system came home to the more 
thoughtful with novel and appalling 
force. Its old evils were as gross as 
ever : the disturbance and impoverish- 
ment of the public service: the horri- 
ble injustice to a great body of faithful 
public servants •, the creation of a class 
of political loafers hanging on the skirts 
of senators and representatives, and 
waiting, like the impecunious Micaw- 
ber, for something to turn up. But all 
of these evils were innocuous com- 
pared with the drain upon the energies 
of public men, who needed all their 
stock for the new problems that were 
coming up, and the corruption of those 
energies by base misuse. Hence the 
decay of legislative faculty, the shrink- 
ing of the statesman and the bloating 
of the obsequious henchman into the 



65 

party boss — that great American fun- 
gus which thrives best where there is 
most rottenness and makes it more. 

Here was a new slavery needing a 
new Garrison to demand immediate 
and unconditional abolition, while still 
disposed to make the most of every 
possible abridgment of the monstrous 
wrong. George William Curtis was the 
man who met the requisition. But as 
Garrison had his Benjamin Lundy, so 
Curtis had his Thomas Allen Jenckes. 
Thirty years before he had listened 
with admiration to a commencement 
poem by a young man of that name, 
and was particularly pleased with one 
line of it, which described the dude of 
that Jacksonian time, a character as 
yet unnamed, as '^ vain folly's last edi- 
tion, bound in calf." Little the boy 
who joined in the uproarious applause 
that followed this description imagined 
9 



66 

that the youth whom he applauded 
would be his brave forerunner in the 
abatement of the most insidious evil 
that has ever preyed upon the vitals of 
our national life. 

It was in 1865 that Mr. Jenckes in- 
troduced his first bill for the reform 
of the civil service into the House of 
Representatives. It was not till 1871 
that the lineal descendant of this bill 
went into operation. In the meantime 
Mr. Jenckes, a lawyer, a scholar, a 
statesman, whose ample modesty could 
not conceal the breadth and lofty stat- 
ure of his mind, did more than any one, 
if not than all others, to keep the work 
alive. His elaborate reports are still 
an arsenal from which all needful weap- 
ons can be drawn to fight the battle of 
reform. Curtis, whose advocacy of the 
movement had been from the beginning 
to the end of the initial stage, was made 



67 

President of the Commission which 
General Grant appointed to carry out 
the new regulations. For two years he 
gave himself with restless ardor to the 
work of the Commission, conscious of 
the increasing enmity of the President's 
party and of his declining interest, so 
plastic was the President's mind to Mr. 
Conkling's eager stress, while Mr. Conk- 
ling was the arch-enemy of the reform. 
When Curtis told the President that 
he would be overpowered by adverse 
pressure, " he smiled incredulously, but 
he presently abandoned reform." Cur- 
tis's disappointment was immense ; his 
chagrin was hardly less ; but it was not 
long before he rallied his sick heart, 
and went to work as never in his life 
before to force the matter on the pub- 
lic conscience and through that on the 
jealous partisans of either House, who 
relished not a change whereby their 



68 

darling occupation would be gone. 
Civil Service associations and the Na- 
tional League were formed, and Mr. 
Curtis, as the President of the League 
and of the New York Association, for 
a dozen years exercised a powerful in- 
fluence on the progress of events. The 
opposition was as bitter and as rancor- 
ous as he anticipated, but he was never 
more himself than when encountering 
a proud and arrogant majority; and 
to read his leaders is to feel how 
his blood warmed with the encounter, 
while still his head remained as cool 
'N,^^ as ever and his hand as firm. 

Teaching in parables in one of his 
addresses at the Annual Meeting of the 
League, he told the story of the North- 
ern soldier who, asking a companion 
about some hellish noise, was an- 
swered, "That is the rebel yell. Does 
it frighten you ?" " Frighten me !'' 



69 

said the questioner — " it is the music 
to which I march/' Not otherwise for 
him was the enraged and savage yell 
of those who were resolved that they 
must have the offices to keep their loyal 
henchmen and their vicious heelers in 
good heart. Andrews Norton said that 
reading Joseph Buckminster's orations 
was like walking in the triumphal pro- 
cession of truth. To read the twelve 
addresses which Curtis made as Presi- 
dent of the League is like marching 
in the triumphal procession of reform. 
The procession had its delays and halts, 
as all such processions do , but from 
Hayes, too conscientious to be loved 
by baser men, to Garfield, a sacrifice 
on the polluted shrine of the Spoils 
System , and from Arthur, solemnized 
by his tragical initiation, to Cleveland, 
striving against fearful odds, there was 
a great advance. The last weeks of Pres- 



70 

ident Harrison's administration have 
seen a tardy extension of the Classified 
Service, corresponding to a similar late 
repentance of his predecessor, and now 
that service numbers forty-four thou- 
sand offices — nearly, or quite, one fourth 
of all the civil offices in the United 
States. No friend of the reform imas:- 
ines that the Commission is a perfect 
instrument , no one pretends that it 
excludes all partisan influence. The 
germs of cholera and tv'phus are more 
easily destroyed. But the gain has 
been immense, and it is prophecy and 
pledge of better things to come. The 
reform attracted many generous and 
noble spirits; but for high enthusiasm 
and exalted purpose and unconquer- 
able hope Curtis was ever easily the 
first, the leader and inspirer of the 
sometimes wavering, often weary and 
impatient, line. We love to think of 



71 

Wren's " St mo7iu7nentum '' in the great 
London church he built to God. Cur- 
tis will have various monuments — here 
a memorial academy and there a statue 
of imperishable bronze , but there will 
be a better one than these. "Would 
you see his monument, look around 
you." When every civil office in our 
various States and cities and in the na- 
tional government has been redeemed 
from the old wickedness and folly, to 
see the monument of Curtis we shall 
only have to look around us on a polit- 
ical system answering to his hope, of 
which every true American may be 
justly proud. 

The life of Curtis was so full of va- 
rious activities that only the most sa- 
lient can be named in such an address 
as this. But it must not go unsaid 
that, as Regent and Chancellor of the 
University of the State of New York, 



72 

he so interpreted and discharged the 
duties of each office in its turn that 
the high-sounding titles were not too 
venerable and august to suit the port 
and carriage of the man ; though the 
regret of Charles Lamb was his also, 
that he had never fed upon '' the sweet 
food of academic institution." In his 
Chancellor's address of 1890 he said, 
"Amid the exaltation and coronation 
of material success let this University 
here annually announce in words and 
deeds the dignity and superiority of 
the intellectual and spiritual life, and 
strengthen itself to resist the insidious 
invasion of that life by the superb and 
seductive spirit of material prosperity." 
In those words you have the spiritual 
essence of his life. It was his calm 
yet passionate preference for things 
beautiful and true and good to things 
loud and showy and unreal ; his con- 



73 

fidence that no material prosperity was 
worth having without devotion to ideal 
ends, even if without such devotion it 
could long endure. 

The multitude of his lectures and 
addresses upon educational and social 
topics does not more approve the 
bounty of his mind than it does the 
goodness of his heart. But this had 
many illustrations. It was like him to 
read every word of Pierce's "Sumner" 
in manuscript with critical attention. 
He found it none too long for his un- 
failing interest in the depiction of a 
splendid fame. He was always doing 
things that had no such reward, nor 
any but the pleasure which they gave. 
His talk was history and biography 
and poetry and politics, a wealth of 
anecdote, a stream of golden reminis- 
cences of men and things ; and, could 
he have had a Boswell to take it down, 

lO 



74 

when he came to print it the capital 
" I " would not have given out, as with 
the Oxford scholar, for his talk was 
little of himself. Ever loyal to the de- 
parted days, the new poets and musi- 
cians could not wean him from the old. 
" Lohengrin " ? Yes, but then " Lucia '' 
too ; and Longfellow and Tennyson in 
hearty preference to those 

" howling dervishes of song 
Who craze the brain with their delirious dance. " 

Freely he had received ; as freely he 
dispensed; and yet the best of all he 
had to give was neither this nor that : 
it was himself, his personality, so quiet 
yet so strong, interpenetrating alike his 
greatest duties and his humblest tasks, 
and his most leisured hours as well, 
with something very noble, sweet, and 
good, and drawing us to him by such 
cords of reverence and affection that 



75 

we would not break them if we could, 
and could not if we would. 

Reverently and gratefully blending 
the name of Lowell with that of Wash 
ington in his address a year ago, he 
called them "men whose lives are a 
glorious service and whose memories 
are a benediction." " Such Americans 
are/' he said, " like mountain summits 
that announce the day, harbingers of 
the, future which shall justify our faith 
and fulfil the promise of America to 
mankind." Of these mountain sum- 
mits there are as many in our history 
as there are in Switzerland of those 
which from the Rigi's top one sees in 
a continuous line for many a shining 
league — the Jungfrau and the Wetter- 
horn and the Silberhorn and a hun- 
dred others, each one a Monte Rosa 
in the early dawn. But it is not always 
the highest of the range whose appeal is 



76 

strongest to our hearts , and if, among 
the mountain summits of our history, 
there are those that lift themselves with 
more solitary grandeur into a colder 
air, there is not one that shines with 
a more lovely light than that of the 
scholar, the writer, the humorist, the 
orator, the patriot, the reformer, the 
man "whose every word and thought 
was a good deed" — whom you shall 
name in silence in your grateful hearts. 



THE END 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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